


form/function

by inverse



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-29
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:58:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inverse/pseuds/inverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>aomine helps kagami out with an important request.</p>
            </blockquote>





	form/function

**Author's Note:**

  * For [softintelligence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/softintelligence/gifts).



“Huh? Don’t wanna, that’s troublesome,” Aomine said into his phone, but then Kagami replied, “Aw, c’mon, do me a favour, how about that time I beat you at one-on-one?” “Once out of about five hundred times,” drawled Aomine, preparing to hang up, “and I don’t think your _kid brother_ needs someone to babysit him.” “I promised him that I’d be done by today, but he’s here early, and Coach wants to debrief us one by one – she’s probably gonna take some time,” Kagami cut in before Aomine could shut him off. “Just help me out, idiot, I’ll buy you a bunch of burgers. Text you the venue soon.” No sooner had roughly three minutes passed than he received a message from Kagami, which said, _bball court @ yoyogi park as usual, thx._ “Tch, does he actually expect me to do what he says?” he muttered, mostly to himself, and Momoi piped up, “Just do him the favour, Dai-chan, you already have few friends as it is.” “Shut up, old hag,” Aomine told her, but while they were on the train which was bringing them back home, Momoi continued, looking out the window in mock forlornness, “Ahh, maybe Kagamin will get angry with you if you don’t do it. You didn’t even text him back.”

So he got off the train reluctantly at the next station, thoroughly displeased with the fact that Momoi had managed to talk him into doing it, lied that he needed to buy something to save himself some face, and listened to Momoi gloat, “Go make some new friends, Dai-chan, Kagamin will be thankful.” That was how he ended up crossing the platform, taking the train back in the opposite direction, and then transferring to _another_ line, before actually taking a ten-minute walk to the aforementioned basketball court, wondering all the while why the hell he was putting so much effort, i.e. any effort, into this, especially when he could have gone home to get some quality sleep after a five-day long summer camp. When he arrived, he found one Himuro Tatsuya, who, wearing a simple white t-shirt and faded jeans, bangs still over one eye like Aomine remembered, duffel bag at his feet, was shooting hoops at one end of the court (the other side being occupied by a bunch of elementary school kids who were almost cute and a bit pathetic in their failed attempts to dunk). Himuro stopped when he saw Aomine walking his way, catching the ball, smiling pleasantly, and said, “Hi. Aomine Daiki, right?”

 

*

 

Just three days ago Aomine and Kagami were at the same training camp, doing the same fitness regimen, although Aomine did find some time throughout to sneak off and do whatever he liked, which was lying in his own room looking at porn mags, until Wakamatsu found him and hauled him back to training with Momoi’s help. Seirin and Touou had a joint arrangement after the Interhigh, in the middle of the hot, lazy summer, the time during which Aomine was sure could have been utilised for something better, more worthwhile, and more meaningful. Like catching crayfish in a pond, or something. Still, it was worth playing a couple of games with Kuroko and Kagami, just to see that they still sucked at basketball, and to see a desperate Wakamatsu sneaking occasional desperate glances at Seirin’s monster of a female coach. Seirin’s captain, in return, looked at him as if he was gonna rip him a new one.

Kagami did mention something about someone coming down to visit him. “Oh yeah, Tatsuya,” he said over lunch one day, which was, quite thankfully, prepared by Ryou and some dude on the Seirin team who didn’t talk much. (Momoi was almost found guilty of culpable homicide, thanks to some onigiri she passed around to the unknowing Seirin team on day one.) “He said he might come down to Tokyo to look for me since it’s summer vacation.” Sounding like some kind of lovesick awestruck puppy.

“Himuro-kun’s from Yosen, right? Does that mean Mukkun’s gonna come visit as well?” asked Momoi.

“Who cares,” said Aomine, rolling over on his side.

“Sorry to bother you,” Himuro began, tossing the ball from one hand to another. “I’m Himuro. I told Taiga it wasn’t necessary, but he seemed to really insist on it.”

 _Then why make me come all the way down here?_ was Aomine’s first thought, but he wouldn’t allow himself to admit that he got bossed around by Kagami in some way or another, so he settled for saying, “Are we gonna do anything, or are you gonna stand there just talking all day long?”

If Himuro was taken aback by the brashness, he didn’t show it.

“Well, since you’re here,” he said, throwing the ball towards Aomine, who caught it, “a game? You’re dressed for the occasion anyway.”

“Sure,” Aomine replied, putting down his gym bag, because what else were two people going to do at a basketball court? “Let’s see if you’re any good.”

 

*

 

They played to see who’d score ten hoops first, and Aomine won, ten to four. To be honest, he wasn’t really playing his best, since camp had just ended and he was absurdly tired and sleep-deprived and actually kind of sore from the Spartan regimen which Momoi and Monster Coach worked on together, but he wasn’t about to let Mr. Touchy here know that, either. Basically, he was tired and faked out on one of his blocks, and Himuro got a bit snappy. Well, if he’d been playing at full strength, there wouldn’t have been much of a game anyway. His last goal in was a careless, almost half-assed attempt from the far right end of the court, made when Himuro was trying his best to defend, and the ball went sailing into the hoop at an easy, jaunty forty-five degree angle. Himuro turned and watched the ball go in and mumbled something like, “That’s just sick,” looking none too pleased and mildly impressed at the same time.

“You play a lot of streetball?” Himuro asked later, duffel bag slung over one shoulder. They’d agreed on getting lunch, and Aomine was getting hungry anyway.

“Yeah,” Aomine replied, stretching out his aching back muscles. “When I was a kid. Picked up the basics playing at the courts near my home.”

“Same,” Himuro smiled fondly, as if remembering something familiar. “I played streetball too, when I was in LA.” Aomine didn’t respond, so he clarified, “Los Angeles. In America.”

“I knew what that was.”

Aomine flipped his phone open, only to find a dozen missed calls and messages from Kagami, asking where the hell he was and whether he’d gone to the basketball court, along with promises of a week’s worth of lunches. Buried within them was one from Momoi – _are u enjoying yourself? ^^_ Aomine rolled his eyes and flipped his phone shut again.

They walked some distance past the adjacent football field, then followed a path out of the park onto the main road. “There's a Maji Burger right down the street, underneath a block of flats,” Aomine explained as they passed an NHK office building. “We go there sometimes, after playing basketball at that park just now, since it's in the area. You don't mind burgers, do you?”

“Of course not, ” Himuro replied. Then he continued, “Some things just don't change, do they? Back in the US we'd have burgers after playing, too.” He beamed up at Aomine, as if expecting him to join him in enthusing about shared post-basketball activities.

“Don't get it twisted. I personally like burgers.”

Himuro turned back to the main street as Maji Burger loomed into sight. “Well, whatever it is, I'm glad he has such good friends now. He used to be a bit of a loner when he was a kid.”

“We're not friends,” was the knee-jerk response that came spilling out of Aomine's mouth before he even knew it. Himuro raised his eyebrows, then said, “Really,” face shifting back into nonchalance.

 

*

 

There was a ring hanging from a chain from Himuro’s neck that looked awfully familiar, and Aomine couldn’t remember where he’d seen it, until it was his turn to place his order at the counter and he realised, staring up at pictures of onion rings on the display menu, that it was the exact same one that Kagami also wore around his neck, the same ring, same chain, everything. “Rings … uh,” he said, when the attendant craned her neck to stare curiously up at him, “onion rings to go with my set meal. And fries too, dammit.”

Himuro ordered the same thing Kagami would have ordered if he was here, except that he ordered only one burger instead of, like, ninety-nine, but cheeseburgers and fries and Coke were probably the commonest of all fast food orders. “They were childhood friends, apparently,” Kuroko explained one night during camp, when they were seated around the second-floor veranda of their lodge, and Kagami had gone off to buy stuff from a vending machine. “They had a huge argument … not really sure what it was about. But they’ve patched things up since then. Kagami-kun seemed really happy about that. Seems like they talk to one another quite often these days.”

“Aww, that’s sweet,” said Momoi, and Aomine would have been sure that she meant it had she not been mooning dreamily in the direction of Kuroko’s face.

Himuro took the chance to interrogate Aomine about Kagami’s life in Tokyo in the past six months. Not that Aomine knew anything much outside of the basketball, and did Kagami do anything else anyway? They ended up talking about the high school basketball scene in Tokyo (it was, apparently, a bit scarce up there in Akita), and before he knew it, he’d finished his burger and half his fries. And all the onion rings. He hadn’t even felt it go down. That would teach him to talk so much while eating. Shit, he totally wanted to go home. When the hell was Kagami going to turn up?

“Oh yeah,” Himuro began, just as Aomine was contemplating whether to get another round of fries. And maybe one of those cheesecake mousse parfait things they had going on as a seasonal dessert, those looked good, if a bit twee. “You went to the same school as Atsushi, right? Teikou?” If he was trying to make small talk, this was a terrible topic of conversation. The only real memories that Aomine had of Murasakibara, other than the snacks littered all over the gym, and the basketball, of course, were of him cross-dressing in some fancy French costume that one time at the school festival.

“Yeah.”

“Atsushi’s a good kid,” Himuro commented, looking quite fond, and Aomine nearly bit his own tongue while chewing and wondering in what kind of bizarro universe someone like Murasakibara would be considered anything vaguely good. Himuro’s, obviously.

“That guy has a mean streak, and all he does is eat. He’s lucky he’s good at basketball.”

“Well, I won’t tell him you said that.”

He stared at Aomine in kind of like the same moony way that Momoi was always staring at Kuroko, except not so smitten, kind of pensive, actually, but it was still kind of weird and gross, so Aomine asked him, “What?”, and watched him snap out of it.

“Nothing. You really remind me of him, kind of.” Then, for the second time in a day, he clarified, in response to Aomine’s non-response, “Taiga, that is.”

“Huh,” Aomine replied, frowning. He’d heard that a couple of times, from Kuroko, from Momoi, even once from Midorima, who’d texted him to complain about Kagami, and at the same time, draw the unflattering comparison. To be honest, he’d thought that himself a few times, too, but that would really be giving Kagami too much credit. “That doesn’t sound like a compliment to me.”

Himuro just laughed wryly, as if to mean, who said it was a compliment?

 

*

 

Kagami called him that night while he was playing a video game, fighting some mid boss. “He said he kind of wanted to punch you,” Kagami said, voice hushed. There was the sound of basketball in the background, some commentating, and cheering. Watching a game on the TV? “You didn’t go easy on him, did you? He hates that.”

The receiver, sandwiched between Aomine’s head and his shoulder, was slipping out of its grip. He raised his shoulder, pressed the receiver harder to his ear, and hit the buttons on the PS3 controller as fast as he could. Shit, this one was really tough. His hands were cramping up. “Speak up, I can’t hear you, your TV’s so damn loud. And tell him that it’s mutual.”

 

*

 

The thing was, Touou had never played Yosen before, whether competitively or in a friendly, because Yosen was up north in fucking Akita and it was bloody inconvenient. They could only play together at the national level, since both schools were from different prefectures, and even then they never really seemed to end up in the same bracket in tournaments. The last time Aomine had seen Himuro play, therefore, was really at Yosen’s match with Seirin, at the last Winter Cup six months ago, and other than that, kind of at the finals, when Aomine spotted him lurking around. They missed one another playing in the same slot at the Interhigh this year, and Touou advanced while Yosen didn’t. So.

Up close and in person, Himuro’s basketball actually felt faster than it actually looked from afar. He was lightning quick, and precise to boot. Lots of simple, clean lines. A lot of it was predictable – basic moves and stances that looked like they could have come out of a Basketball 101 manual, but he was so good at these basic little things that they didn’t seem basic anymore. In fact, Aomine had never really met anybody who had adapted the fundamentals so thoroughly to their own playing style that they seemed like a walking textbook. Most of the time what people had was a mish-mash of the conventional forms and their own habits, so they’d be off by a degree or two. 

Long story short, Aomine didn’t really want to play Himuro so much as he wanted to see him play, and he was up 3 – 1 anyway, so when Himuro got the ball at the free-throw line, he decided to just wing the defence – kind of just – swatted a bit as Himuro made the shot – and the ball went through. Huh. Nice.

“Did you do that on purpose?” Himuro asked, after he’d gotten the ball back and approached Aomine for the next challenge.

“Do what,” said Aomine, seizing the opportunity to bat the ball out of Himuro’s hands, but Himuro managed to evade him, dribbling to his left and rounding Aomine to the middle of the court.

“You didn’t really try to block that,” he said, while Aomine chased after him. “I could tell.”

“No, sorry,” Aomine admitted. “Old habit. My bad.”

Himuro had already gotten into shooting form, so Aomine retraced his steps, hoping to catch the ball in midair. He jumped, but the ball flew right over him and into the basket, making a loud, angry sound that could only be described as, quite possibly, the sound of bad karma. It bounced down onto the concrete and rolled backwards, and Aomine went after it.

“Please don’t do that again,” Himuro said when Aomine looked back, his face still pleasantly neutral, but there was a definite coldness to his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“Okay, you said it,” Aomine replied, vaguely annoyed. Not like he was trying it in an official game. He started to dribble.

 

*

 

“He’s in the shower. And why? You’re not much better. You probably annoyed the shit out of him first. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I didn’t. And are you an idiot? Go talk in your room or something. Though if you don’t have anything else to say, I’m gonna hang up. I’m busy.”

“Busy doing what, fapping to Mai-chan again?” Aomine grumbled, pressing the O button again feebly. Kagami coughed. “Well, uh,” he continued, as Aomine’s avatar onscreen bled out the last remnants of its HP. Fuck. “Thanks again for helping me out.” The obligatory cutscene of death started playing, and Aomine thought of what Kuroko had told him about them both. “And, uh, not punching the lights out of each other. He has a really mean right hook.”

“Yeah? So do I.”

“Anyway – he’s gonna be staying over for a few days, so if you’re interested in playing –”

“Are you done blabbing?”

“– okay, okay. I mean, he didn’t say he hated playing you, that’s for sure. Kuroko might come too, so just turn up and round out the numbers, alright? Okay, wait, he’s out. Text you soon.”

Aomine put down the receiver. His ear was throbbing where the phone had been, pressed hard against the cartilage, just moments ago. He probably wouldn’t have lost if he weren’t talking on the phone. Cursing, he watched the rest of the annoyingly unskippable cutscene, waited for the title screen to appear, selected “Load Last Saved File”, and waited for the game to reboot. Fine, if he could copy Momoi’s homework like he always did, he was free for all of next week.

 

*

 

Actually, they were talking about the NBA a while before Kagami finally arrived. They should have started talking about that sooner. Anyway, having hailed from Los Angeles, Himuro was, naturally, a Lakers fan. “I couldn't watch the games very often, though,” he recounted. “The tickets were expensive – I had an allowance but not that much allowance – and once Alex – she was our coach back in the US – snuck us in to a game since she had some connections. Lakers vs. Heat. I was twelve.” “Must have been great,” Aomine said, pretending not to give a damn, even though his insides were twisting so hard with jealousy he wanted to die.

Himuro seemed like he was about to add something when his phone rang. “It's Taiga,” he said, as if expecting Aomine to care, then picked up the call and launched into a very English and very unintelligible conversation. Damn Americans.

“He’s coming soon,” Himuro told him when the call ended, and Aomine shrugged, going for more fries.

Kagami did turn up fifteen minutes later, still wearing his gym t-shirt and training sweats, looking as if he’d ran all the way from the train station to the restaurant, slapped Aomine on the back, gave Himuro a fist bump, took a seat, then proceeded to launch into yet another unintelligible English coversation for five minutes while Aomine chewed on the remainder of his now cold, cold fries. Probably about how he was so sorry for being late and I haven’t seen you in years and is your ass numb from that train ride down from snow country in the middle of nowhere?

“I’m still sitting here, you know,” he interrupted finally. “Don’t talk in some weird language I don’t understand.”

“It’s not weird, it’s English,” corrected Kagami. “Anyway, you’ve eaten? Want some more?”

“Some other time. A week’s worth, you promised,” Aomine reminded him. Then, getting the distinct feeling that his mission was accomplished, and that he had therefore suddenly become a bit of an unneeded presence, he finished off the rest of his soda, grabbed his bag, slung it over his head, and stood up. He glared at Kagami. “I’m going home. You bastard, I could have been sleeping.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Kagami scowled.

“Thanks for keeping me company,” Himuro said, offering another one of those irritatingly placid smiles, and Aomine grunted in reply. Kagami waved him goodbye. On the way home, all he could think of was how Momoi was probably going to be there when he got back, sitting at the kotatsu in his living room and doing her homework while his mother served her hot tea and snacks, and she’d be waiting delightedly to ask him how his afternoon had went, then laugh at him a lot. The train was going fast and all he wanted to do was fall into the warm comfort of his bed, which he hadn’t seen in days. He yawned, head full of straight lines and perfect arcs.


End file.
